As someone with pretty good prosopagnosia, I am also unsettled and disturbed at all of y’all’s hardware acceleration for facial recognition.
I was 30 before I realized that when people recognize each other, it’s not from clothes and hair, or voice, or some kind of cognitive memory like “Bob has big ears and a wide nose”.
So, while I’m sympathetic and supportive of concerns about AI glasses, please also realize that to a subset of the population (about 1% IIRC), most of you already have a weird and privacy-violating skill, right there in the neurons.
Fun to see my small project end up on hn. I think the project page and the blog post outlines most of why I'm doing this, but I'm happy to answer any questions or such. Cheers.
Is the terrible idea "always-on AI glasses" or is it "giving all the data they collect to Meta with no proper regulation in place"?
My phone and laptop already collect a ton of data that is more than I would like to share with a company that thinks of me as a product. But that data collection is unavoidable as a side effect of very useful functionality. We need to focus on trust, not restriction.
Pick a technology --- AR, robotics, AVs, SMRs, the cookie header --- and you'll find a well-funded and sanctimonious ecosystem of NGOs, regulatory bodies, and compliance departments dedicated to ensuring nobody uses it.
The pretext for these bans is always that unassailable cluster of feel-good yet vague virtues like privacy or the environment that you can make mean anything you want, but the reality on the Continent is just a rotating series of excuses for the catechism of "no, non, nein".
And it's never enough to just regulate the EU. Oh, no. The EU is the world's moral guardian, a "regulatory superpower", humanity's conscience. Obviously EU regulation should apply worldwide. The rest of humanity can't be trusted to care about privacy and the environment enough, right?
Well, I'm sick of it. How about they start saying ja to something? How about they walk about HOW we incorporate fledging technological capabilities into society instead of trying to freeze our information environment in 2008 amber?
At this point, when thinking about how we deploy new technology, I'm inclined to just leave Europe behind. Seal it off from the world of innovation with firewall rules and geofencing. The alternative is to suspend technology, the only thing that's ever in all history improved the human condition, for the sake of small-minded, small-hearted people who like mankind less than they love nein.
Saying ja/oui to something, is saying nein/non to something else.
If all you have is taking sides with what ought to be dismissed, or rather, discussed and controlled, rather than let alone wild at the expense of most people, that's a choice that is yours.
19 comments
I was 30 before I realized that when people recognize each other, it’s not from clothes and hair, or voice, or some kind of cognitive memory like “Bob has big ears and a wide nose”.
So, while I’m sympathetic and supportive of concerns about AI glasses, please also realize that to a subset of the population (about 1% IIRC), most of you already have a weird and privacy-violating skill, right there in the neurons.
Fun to see my small project end up on hn. I think the project page and the blog post outlines most of why I'm doing this, but I'm happy to answer any questions or such. Cheers.
My phone and laptop already collect a ton of data that is more than I would like to share with a company that thinks of me as a product. But that data collection is unavoidable as a side effect of very useful functionality. We need to focus on trust, not restriction.
The pretext for these bans is always that unassailable cluster of feel-good yet vague virtues like privacy or the environment that you can make mean anything you want, but the reality on the Continent is just a rotating series of excuses for the catechism of "no, non, nein".
And it's never enough to just regulate the EU. Oh, no. The EU is the world's moral guardian, a "regulatory superpower", humanity's conscience. Obviously EU regulation should apply worldwide. The rest of humanity can't be trusted to care about privacy and the environment enough, right?
Well, I'm sick of it. How about they start saying ja to something? How about they walk about HOW we incorporate fledging technological capabilities into society instead of trying to freeze our information environment in 2008 amber?
At this point, when thinking about how we deploy new technology, I'm inclined to just leave Europe behind. Seal it off from the world of innovation with firewall rules and geofencing. The alternative is to suspend technology, the only thing that's ever in all history improved the human condition, for the sake of small-minded, small-hearted people who like mankind less than they love nein.
If all you have is taking sides with what ought to be dismissed, or rather, discussed and controlled, rather than let alone wild at the expense of most people, that's a choice that is yours.